Intel's Optane Memory

Intel's Optane Memory Makes Cheap Hard Drives as Fast as Expensive SSDs

 


            Memory is anything in a computer that reads and writes data. There’s memory in your processor, in your RAM, and all the way down to your USB drives. “It’s like a pyramid,” Greg Schulz, a storage analyst and operator of StorageIO told Gizmodo. “As you go down the pyramid the capacity is cheaper, but slower.” So the tip of the pyramid is the memory in your CPU, then comes DRAM, then NAND-based flash storage like SSDs, then hard disk drives. At the very bottom would be the oldest and cheapest kind of memory tape drives.

           After you understand the pyramid there’s only one other thing you really need to understand: volatile and non-volatile memory. Volatile memory tends to be faster—it’s DRAM or the stuff built into your CPU. It’s crazy speedy and writes at the smallest possible read/write level: the byte level. Yet volatile memory can’t actually remember anything when it loses power. So the minute you restart your computer, volatile memory forgets everything it’s learned.
       
           The first time you open a big program on a computer after a restart, it takes longer than usual. Why? Your computer’s DRAM has forgotten all the crucial info it needs to open the program quickly.
Non-volatile memory doesn’t have that problem, but it’s also a lot slower, and can’t write at the byte level. So what is non-volatile memory? It’s the stuff that maintains all the data it learns even when it’s not receiving power. It’s persistent memory. As soon as something is classified as persistent memory it can take on another name: storage. Every hard drive, floppy, or thumb drive you use is persistent memory.

           Intel Optane memory is cool because its uses an entirely new entry on the memory pyramid: 3D Xpoint memory. 3D Xpoint slots in right between DRAM and NAND. It’s as fast as the volatile stuff—capable of reading at that crucial byte level—but it’s also persistent. It’s the best of both worlds.

What the is 3D Xpoint memory?

           “Since digital memory was created, there’s only been eight major memories, the most recent being 3D Xpoint,” Schulz said. The last big memory advancement before 3D Xpoint? That was NAND, which was introduced back in 1999. “These things only come around every couple of decades.”

            3D Xpoint was announced by Intel and Micron way back in 2015, sixteen years after the last big memory leap. At the time, the two companies promised that 3D Xpoint was a thousand times faster than NAND, but just as persistent. Which would mean a whole new ultrafast medium for storing data. Yet it’s taken nearly two years to go from announcing the memory to actually putting it in hardware.

What is Intel Optane memory?

           Intel’s Optane memory is the first instance of 3D Xpoint being used in consumer-level products. There’s already a 3D Xpoint storage drive available, taking advantage of the technology’s incredible speed.

           Optane memory is Intel’s shot at giving consumers an affordable taste of 3D Xpoint’s incredible speed. It functions as a cache system for your primary storage drive, storing necessary data, sort of like RAM might, but holding onto that data in between restarts.